NYPD Red 2: by James Patterson & Marshall Karp ★Summary & Analysis★
Drawing on vast writing experience, James Patterson, with Marshall Karp, has added to his standing as "the busiest man in publishing" with NYPD Red 2. The novel tells a story that will ring true for many readers, following Detectives Jordan and MacDonald through a tense investigation that suffers several reversals before coming to a classic ending. Along the way, Patterson and Karp use the text to comment about the gap between law and justice and the dangers of trying to bridge it without sufficient structure.
James Patterson and Marshall Karp’s NYPD Red 2 is a typical action novel centering on an investigation by Zach Jordan and Kylie MacDonald, partnered detectives in the eponymous NYPD Red—an elite investigative unit that handles cases involving the particularly rich and famous. The investigation pursues the Hazmat Killer, evidently a serial killer of unusual skill who operates as a vigilante and “brings justice” to those whom the justice system has wrongly freed. As is to be expected, after several reversals, Jordan and MacDonald do manage to identify the killer and prevent Hazmat from continuing to murder those acquitted by the justice system.
Divided into five parts (a prologue, three major divisions, and an epilogue), NYPD Red 2 shifts narrative point of view irregularly, sometimes recounting the story from the Jordan’s first-person limited perspective, sometimes narrating from a third-person omniscient position. Transitions between them are not clearly marked, making for confusion at chapter breaks and disrupting the flow of the story.
This Analysis of NYPD Red 2 fills the gap, making you understand more while enhancing your reading experience.